Quote of the day

"Leaders from both parties -- Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and Democrat Ted Kennedy -- have vowed to push through a new, wide-reaching federal 'hate crimes' bill before the end of the current session. A 'hate crimes' law would make crimes motivated by enmity toward blacks, gays or other protected groups into a special federal offense....The proposed law declares that criminals motivated by a government-designated set of intolerable ideas -- racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, anti-homosexuality -- deserve special prosecution and additional punishment. But to subject someone to trial and punishment on the basis of his ideas -- regardless of how despicable those ideas might be -- constitutes a politicization of criminal law.... A 'hate crimes' law would expand the law's concern from criminal action to 'criminal thought.' It would institute the premise that the purpose of our legal system is not to defend the rights of the victim, but to punish socially unacceptable ideas. This is a premise that should be abhorrent to a free society....It is an attempt to import into America's legal system a class of crimes formerly reserved only to dictatorships: political crimes. Instead, we should insist on the one principle that forms the foundation for the protection of all rights, i.e., that the purpose of law is to punish criminals for initiating force against others, not for holding bad ideas." --Robert Tracinski